Published 22 October 202120 November 2021 · Friday Features / Friday Poetry Poetry | While we were on Twitter Johanna Bell A kingfisher swallowed a cane toad near Kakadu | A woman in south-east QLD saw rainbow lorikeets fall from the sky | A flock of brolga fished for frogs in an algal bloom | Outside Cairns, a bush-stone curlew bounced off the bonnet of a speeding ute | Near Broome, a grey nomad pulled a blue-faced finch from the radiator of his 4WD | A satin bowerbird choked on a plastic bottle cap | A wandering albatross regurgitated a squid jig | A woman in Parkes discovered a pile of dead galahs Two red balloons were extracted from the swollen belly of a grey-headed albatross | A marine biologist found a barn owl, face in the sand, next to a half-eaten rat | Not far from Adelaide, an Australian gannet drowned in a fishing net | A magpie strutted back and forth on the bitumen beside his flattened mate Flocks of bar-tailed godwit landed in a car park that used to be an estuary | The gang-gang cockatoo, emblem of the ACT, did not return after the bushfires | A boy in Wollongong wrote to Bun- nings “We found a dead sooty owl in our back- yard which has been killed by your stupid rat poison” Bun nin gs d i d n o t r e p l y Author note: This poem is composed from information found in Australian newspaper articles and research papers. It was inspired by a Sydney Morning Herald article titled ‘Off-the-shelf rat poisons killing owls too – and Bunnings asked to act.’ In the article, journalist Miki Perkins, cites BirdLife Australia-commissioned research that found 97% of dead powerful owls in the Sydney region (n=38) had second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides in their livers and 60% had levels high enough to cause impairment. These poisons have been restricted from general sale in the US, Canada and the European Union but can be bought in supermarkets and hardware stores across Australia. According to BirdLife Australia, there are about 25 rat poisons available at Bunnings stores, and all but two are second-generation anticoagulant poisons. Overland’s Friday Features project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Johanna Bell Johanna Bell lives in Darwin where she writes and works as an independent audio producer. Her written work has been published by Allen & Unwin, Scholastic, Overland, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Black Inc and Australian PoetryBirds Eye View, co-created with women in Darwin Prison, won a New York Radio Award, Australian Podcast of the Year and a Walkley Award nomination. Currently, Johanna is working on a verse novel about vanishing birds. More by Johanna Bell › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem First published in Overland Issue 228 15 December 202319 February 2024 · Children ‘We have listened to the community’: hating and imprisoning children in twenty-first-century Australia Stephen Wright Contemporary discussions about the lives and care and education of children in Australia are so cooked, so impoverished and hedged about with assumptions of control and paranoia, that writing an essay like this about childhood, about what it means to be a child in modern Australia, feels like I’m presenting evidence of alien life.